IMPRESSIONS AND OBSESSIONS
The old `Players’ Theatre has a good eye of oddball new musicals, cheap enough to sample before anyone’s train home. And here off-Broadway’s Carmel Owen has made, with palpable love, a romantic and indeed at times borderline soupy full-scale musical in tribute to Claude Monet. In atmosphere , setting and the better performances Christian Durham’s direction and LibbyTodd’s design certainly do what they out to do: convey a fascinated impression of Impressionists .
Especially Monet himself, though there are many scenes of his comradeship with Renoir, Manet and Frédéric Bazille, all struggling with the rigidities of the French Salon and the Royal Academy. This means it is sometimes frustrating not to see more of all their loves and personalities, since Monet himself is a one-track obsessive. Though I did cherish Sam Peggs’ Renoir, panicking when his friend Monet’s wife Camille asks if he knows any midwives to abort her dangerous pregnancy.
But Monet is the writer-composer’s magnet, his life and frustrations the engine of the simple plot. Jeff Shankley addresses us first as the painter in old age, around 1926, blocked and frustrated and taking it out on his devoted stepdaughter Blanche (Meg Matthews at my matinee, standing in for Natalie Day). She was of course herself a considerable artist within the school: more of her would also be interesting. Old Monet stares at us in the opening moments, demanding we be his mirror: he stands on an excellent painterly set of screens and doors and frames which will flower, singly and en-masse, into projected paintings from sunsets and portraits of Camille to a great swirling mass of waterlilies.Then we meet DEan John-Wilson as the artist’s younger self, with a glorious low tenor voice and properly magnetic presence, and for most of the show he is leading a happily rebellious determination to kick the pompous studio conventions and paint outdoors – “side and side, we will share light and air – en plein air!”
The songs are mostly likeable, none standout as memorable. Brooke Bazarian’s Camille – who acts well and looks superb – is perhaps given too much overdone musical angst for my liking: all crises and no calm. Some sharp pattering numbers beetwen the hostile critic Louis and the scornful gallery Marquis are good: I had forgotten that the term “impressionist” started as an insult from this conventional cadre , Louis observing that they were just impressions on canvas, not properly crafted artworks.
But Monet’s vigour and conviction holds the stage as rebel roles will: in the swirl of images around his famous sunrise he cries “Our work had a splendour, a grandeur. The world was changing, and we were in touch!”. But Camille and he had stormy separations: she hated their London exile to avoid the war draft, while he became thrilled by painting British fog and the Thames at Westminster. It’s a portrait of artistic obsession; by the end he is rejoicing in his paintings as if they were his only friends, comrades, his great love. So old Monet furiously rebukes him . So does the ghost of Camille who, in a splendid rant, hands him a brush: the thing he loved more than her. It’s a sharp moment.
charingcrosstheatre.co.uk. to 9 may
rating 3
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